She gave a gasp, and hid her face, shaking. Was this haunting of eye and ear to pursue her now henceforward? Was the passage of Manisty's being through the world to be—for her—ineffaceable?—so that earth and air retained the impress of his form and voice, and only her tortured heart and sense were needed to make the phantom live and walk and speak again?
She began to pray—brokenly and desperately, as she had often prayed during the last few weeks. It was a passionate throwing of the will against a fate, cruel, unjust, intolerable; a means not to self-renunciation, but to a self-assertion which was in her like madness, so foreign was it to all the habits of the soul.
'That he should make use of me to the last moment, then fling me to the winds—that I should just make room, and help him to his goal—and then die meekly—out of the way—No! He too shall suffer!—and he shall know that it is Eleanor who exacts it!—Eleanor who bars the way!'
And in the very depths of consciousness there emerged the strange and bitter recognition that from the beginning she had allowed him to hold her cheaply; that she had been content, far, far too content, with what he chose to give; that if she had claimed more, been less delicate, less exquisite in loving, he might have feared and regarded her more.
She heard the chapel door open. But at the same moment she became aware that her face was bathed in tears, and she did not dare to look round. She drew down her veil, and composed herself as she best could.
The person behind, apparently, also knelt down. The tread and movements were those of a heavy man—some countryman, she supposed.
But his neighbourhood was unwelcome, and the chapel ceased to be a place of refuge where feeling might have its way. In a few minutes she rose and turned towards the door.
She gave a little cry. The man kneeling at the back of the chapel rose in astonishment and came towards her.
'Madame!'
'Father Benecke! you here,' said Eleanor, leaning against the wall for support—so weak was she, and so startling was this sudden apparition of the man whom she had last seen on the threshold of the glass passage at Marinata, barely a fortnight before.